Stewart Avenue's sleaze, crime yield to hope

Dianne Bryant was a teenager when her family moved to a southwest Atlanta neighborhood developing a reputation for catering to the wild side of life.

Now 42, she remembers the prostitutes walking Stewart Avenue near hot-pillow motels; the thumping downbeat oozing from strip clubs; the open drug dealing; and the too-frequent crack of gunfire signaling the end to an argument.

Men sipping from pints concealed in brown bags crowded in front of the old liquor store at the corner of University Avenue, their images appearing ethereal in the dim light that fought through grime-covered store windows.

"It was not a place where regular people wanted to be," said Bryant.

But it wasn't regular people many of the businesses on Stewart Avenue wanted. The 2-mile commercial strip running from Atlanta into Hapeville was notorious from the late 1970s through the 1990s for more than a dozen bars and strip clubs, tumble-down liquor stores, a trailer park and hourly motel rooms such as those at the Alamo Plaza Motor Court, where the only courting conversation needed was, "Want a date?"

Grit, girls and gunfire were Stewart Avenue's trademarks, and whatever you wanted, somebody had it or could get it — for a price.

But the red-light district of Bryant's childhood has dimmed, and legitimate businesses and homeowners have claimed this stretch of U.S. 41.

The recovery has not been complete; the street still has vacant lots, swaths of asphalt once occupied by car dealerships, and boarded up businesses, like FJ's Tavern, the beer-and-burger place Big Joe Lurhman ran until he was gunned down in a 2001 robbery.

Once part of the north-south route used by Florida vacationers, the street may never completely return to its earlier life as a gleaming row of car dealerships and businesses that attracted middle-class shoppers and Sunday afternoon browsers.

Area residents are eager to scrape off the grit of three decades.

The symbolic change began on Aug. 21, 1997, when Atlanta city officials renamed Stewart Avenue as Metropolitan Parkway, in honor of adjacent Atlanta Metropolitan College.

The re-naming provided fodder for comics and talk radio hosts; then-Mayor Bill Campbell was mocked for believing such a simple solution would cause johns and drug addicts to get lost on their way to a score.

But, like crime-ridden areas of other towns, a combination of neighborhood activism, zoning and heavy policing appears to have brought change to a strip most locals simply call "the avenue."

On Metropolitan Parkway, there hasn't been a reported killing in two years and reports of major crime are mostly down across the board, according to Atlanta police crime reports.

In 1997, the year the street's name changed, there were 134 robberies, compared with 47 reported last year, according to the latest Police Department crime statistics. Aggravated assaults went from 118 to 34, larcenies dropped from 481 to 234.

"I would not have urged people to move here 12 years ago, like I am now" says Atlanta City Councilwoman Joyce Shepherd, who lives at Metropolitan and Deckner Avenue.

"We rezoned to close down most of the strip clubs, and we got rid of the sleazy motels for code violations," she said. "Where the old trailer park was is now being developed for nice apartments."

The Alamo Plaza Motor Court, bought for $3.5 million by a nonprofit housing agency with $2.9 million in government loans, is now the Santa Fe Villas, a single-room occupancy hotel providing counseling and job training for the homeless.

The old liquor store site, once a magnet for daylight drunks, is a well-lighted Chevron food market with 16 gas pumps.

Neither residents nor police suggest new buildings and bright lights solved all the street's problems. Three strip clubs remain in the area, and some of the prostitutes chased off Metropolitan Parkway now ply their trade a few blocks off the avenue.

"I'll grant you it's going on around some of the side streets," said Sgt. Marion Battle, a 20-year Atlanta police officer. "But our officers keep it greatly reduced, and Metropolitan is not a hot spot anymore."

Some of the hookers apparently gave up walking Metropolitan. "We've been finding [them] working for escort services now," said Lt. Vincent Moore, police vice squad commander.

Like weeds in a garden, drug houses still find their way into the neighborhood, but it's not like five years ago, said Oscar Leonard, an income tax preparer for H&R Block who has lived on Allene Avenue near Metropolitan since 1984.

Loud conversations, the sounds of idling engines and car horns outside a drug house next door "kept me up at night," Leonard said. When the neighborhood association complained, police descended on the house and made arrests, he said.

Bryant, the woman who has lived in the area since her teen years, has the same sense of improved police response and better communication with residents.

"People are willing to pick up the phone and know the police will come. That wasn't always the case," said Bryant, a fund-raising consultant with the Carter Center.

Reasonable real estate prices and good access to mass transit are attracting new residents.

Ryan Gravel, a city planner, said he moved into the Metropolitan Parkway area five years ago.

"The houses are affordable, the neighborhood has sidewalks, it's near a MARTA station, and there is an interesting, diverse range of people," said Gravel.

"Are we there yet? No. Are we 100 percent clean? No. But the area is gentrifying," said Shepherd, the councilwoman.

Janet Caldwell has watched the evolution for 22 years from her home on Dill Avenue off Metropolitan.

"I know we're in the climbing up mode now, and what the street needs is higher-end retail," said Caldwell, who works for a film and video equipment company.

"You can't leap from Flashers to Macys, I know that.

"We just need to bear in mind, the deterioration of Stewart Avenue didn't happen overnight," she said.